Lesson 6 of 7 · 4 min
Messaging the Provider Team
Use the customer chat channel inside an order to ask questions, share context, and stay in sync with your provider without leaving the app.
Messaging the Provider Team
Video coming soon
Lesson Notes
Each order has a dedicated customer chat channel (labelled 'Client chat' or 'Customer' internally). As an agent, you only ever see and write to this one channel — the provider's internal team channel is not visible to you. The channel is pre-scoped to the order so your messages and all provider replies stay attached to the specific job, not in a general inbox.
On the web, the chat is in the Discussion tab of the order detail. Once the tab is selected, a message composer appears at the bottom with a Tiptap rich-text editor that supports bold, italic, underline, links, and @-mentions. To mention someone, type '@' followed by any part of their name; a dropdown of team members appears. Mentions trigger a notification badge to the mentioned person. To send, click the paper-plane Send button or press the configured shortcut. Sent messages appear above with your avatar and timestamp; you can hover a message to access edit and delete actions for your own messages.
On iOS, the chat surface is a full-screen sheet (ChatView) launched by tapping 'Open chat' from the Messages section in the Appointment tab, or from any of the preview message rows in that section. The sheet presents at .large detent. Type in the text field at the bottom and send with the send button. The sheet closes with a 'Done' button in the navigation bar; when it closes, the chat preview in the Appointment tab automatically refreshes so your sent messages are immediately visible without a manual pull-to-refresh.
The iOS Appointment tab shows a live preview of the three most recent customer-channel messages below a 'MESSAGES' header. This gives you a quick-read of the conversation thread without opening the full sheet — useful when you just want to check if the provider replied to your last message. If the preview shows 'No messages yet' and you are sure you have sent messages, close and reopen the order to force a fresh load.
Push notifications arrive for new messages in the customer channel. Tapping a 'New message' notification on iOS opens OrderDetailView with the chat sheet automatically presented (the initialOpenAction is set to .chat by the deep-link handler, which fires showChat = true after the parallel project, media, and tracking fetches complete). On the web, notification links carry ?tab=discussion&chat=client query params so the detail opens directly to the Discussion tab with the customer-channel pre-selected.
Key Takeaways
- Agents see only the customer (client) chat channel — the provider's internal team chat is not visible to you.
- On the web, use the Discussion tab inside the order detail; the rich-text editor supports @-mentions and formatting.
- On iOS, tap 'Open chat' in the Appointment tab's Messages section to open the full chat sheet; it closes cleanly with a 'Done' button.
- The iOS Appointment tab shows a 3-message preview of the customer channel so you can scan recent activity without opening the full sheet.
- Tapping a 'New message' push notification deep-links directly into the chat sheet on iOS — no need to navigate manually.